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Whatever the causes, the fact is that from the eighth century to some point (varying from country to country) in the eleventh century regular commerce had practically ceased; Western Europe was reduced to a state of almost complete dependence on agriculture. An occasional wandering peddler might still bring to isolated rural communities necessities that could not be produced in the locality, but this thin trickle of trade could have had little effect upon the organization of economic life. In these centuries, land and produce were for all practical purposes the sole form of wealth. This condition contributed to the disintegration of the state and to the formation of political feudalism. But the failure of central government in turn was an important factor in shaping economic and social organization. One major consequence of this failure was the partition of the powers of the state, either by theoretical delegation or outright usurpation, among the great landholders. The landholder thus became a lord with sovereign powers over those living on the land. Conversely, the workers on the land became entirely dependent on their lord and in varying degrees lost their freedom. Only the possession of a considerable estate with its dependent workers could enable a landholder to maintain his position as a member of that military aristocracy which was the ruling class in the feudal system. The domain, or great estate, thus became a necessary economic unit, and by virtue of the lord's sovereign powers it was also a political unit, while its isolation from the rest of the world made it equally, for the peasants at least, a self-contained social unit. Forms of agricultural organization varied greatly in detail, but there was, nevertheless, a remarkable uniformity in all parts of Western Europe. Everywhere the rural community was shaped by the same factors: the lack of outside markets, the resultant ideal of self-sufficiency, and the integrating domination of the workers by the landholding lord.
The great estate, known in Latin as villa, in English as a manor, was not, it is true, the only form of agricultural organization in the Middle Ages. In mountain country, in grazing areas, or wherever the topography of the countryside made it impractical, other forms might be found. And here and there occasional 'allods' -- independent farms held by freemen -- might still be found in the eleventh century. The manor was nevertheless the normal unit of agrarian life. It was in essence a self-sufficient estate, containing the fortified residence of the lord or his agent and a village community composed of more or less unfree workers. The size of manors varied, but it was held within certain limits by practical circumstances. A manor should be large enough to maintain a knight as its lord, with his attendants and the equipment of a mounted warrior. It should also be large enough to justify the construction of a fortified manor house for the protection of the villagers whose huts clustered close about its walls. On the other hand, a manor must not be so large that it could not be worked from the village center. A lord who held more land than could be worked from one village would divide it into more than one manor. A great lord, indeed, might have many manors and these might be widely scattered, but each would be organized as a separate unit, governed by a bailiff as the lord's representative if the lord himself were not in residence. For the organization of agricultural economy and peasant life it mattered little whether the lord, who might be king, baron, bishop, or simple knight, had one manor or many. For our discussion of the manorial system, we can therefore concentrate attention upon the individual manor and ignore for the time being the relative power of its lord and his place in the system of political feudalism.
The large estate was no new development. It antedated the beginnings of feudalism by centuries. But it was its adaptability to the conditions of early feudal society that made it an almost universal institution. When land was the only form of wealth, the lord, whether he was a lay noble or an officer of the Church, needed land to maintain him in the style to which he had become accustomed. Land, however, is worthless without workers, and where there is no cash market for agricultural produce there is no money to pay them. The manorial system offered the simple solution. Part of the land of the manor was retained as demesne for the lord's use. The remainder was divided among the peasants who, in return for protection and the use of the land assigned them, worked the lord's demesne and also contributed part of the produce from their own land. The lord thus acquired unpaid workers, and the peasants paid with services and produce for the use of enough land to feed themselves and their families. The jurisdictional powers of the lord protected him against the loss of workers, but if the tenants were bound to the soil they were by that very fact protected from fear of eviction. What they lost in freedom they gained in the security of hereditary tenure and protection from attack which along made life possible for the poor and unarmed in the violent days of early feudalism.
The manorial system was also well adapted to the primitive methods of agriculture practised throughout the feudal age. To maintain its fertility, part of the land had to be left uncultivated each year. In most parts of Europe a three-year rotation was followed, with one third of the land left fallow each year. The fallow field was allowed to grow up in natural grass on which cattle were turned in to graze. It would have been almost impossible for each peasant to put this system into effect independently on his own small holding. The general practice, therefore, was to divide the arable land of the manor into large fields, some of which might be retained exclusively as demesne, but in the rest of which the peasant holdings together with demesne land were scattered in narrow strips or plowlands. Moreover, few if any peasants owned the four or six oxen needed to make up a plow team. Plowing thus became a communal enterprise. So long as the manor retained its original form, the whole peasant community worked together to cultivate and harvest the manorial fields, though each peasant, as well as the lord, took the produce only of his own land. In addition to the arable fields, the manor also contained meadows and large stretches of waste land and woods. In all of these the lord and the peasants had certain "common" rights, determined by age old custom. To complete its self-sufficiency, the manor usually had a mill, a communal oven, a blacksmith's shop, and a church. These, even in a sense the church, belonged to the lord, and the peasants paid for their use in kind.
A tightly knit little community, each manor had its own body of custom, which regulated the activity of its inhabitants at every turn and determined their relation to each other and to their lord. This custom, believed to be of immemorial antiquity, was the peasants' only substitute for state-enforced law. Less flexible than legislation, custom tended to make peasant society conservative and to impede technical or social progress. To the modern age, it seems an intolerable hindrance to individual enterprise. But in no other way, probably, could communal cultivation of the soil have been made to function. And the semi-legal character of custom had, from the peasants' point of view, the inestimable advantage that it limited to some degree the lord's ability to exploit his dependents. The power of the lord, unchecked as it was by any higher authority, was arbitrary and oppressive enough, especially in relation to the more servile class of peasants who were taxable at the lord's will. The labor services demanded by the lord in an case imposed a constant hardship upon the peasants, who needed all their time and strength to wrest a living with inadequate tools from a few strips of poorly fertilized soil. Nevertheless, the manorial system, with its deeply rooted custom, gave to the peasant class a fair amoung of security and a reasonable stable organization, in contrast to the generally chaotic condition which prevailed in the upper brackets of feudal society.